Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (73 page)

Thank you, he said. The woman gazed after him in alarm; he must have looked unwell. When he got home, he vomited, then lay down for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon he telephoned the doctor.

Can you explain your problem? said the advice nurse. The doctor will call you back.

I'm dying.

Sir, if this is an emergency you'd better come straight in.

It's not an emergency.

Then what would you like the doctor to do for you? Do you need a refill on your pain medication?

I'd like something stronger.

Then you'll need to make an appointment. What's your date of birth?

I could give you my date of death.

That's not what we go by, sir.

What do
you
go by in your life?

Sir, the doctor can fit you in tomorrow at three-o'-clock. Make sure you bring your insurance card with you.

You, too, he said. He hung up, chewed up three antacids as delicately as if he were making love to them, waited a quarter-hour, then swallowed three pain pills.

Down on the far side of the cemetery lay Hal Murmuracki's Chapel of Flowers, an establishment whose black hearse never left the carport and whose lights whispered day and night through the closed blinds. It was early evening now, and the pills supported him. He turned the long doorlatch. On the left an old man sat behind a half open door, verifying accounts by means of a silent adding machine.

Yes, said the man. Please sit down.

I'd like some flowers. To . . .

What kind of flowers?

Moonflowers, he replied.

I don't believe I've heard of those.

They're . . . Well, I've never seen them myself.

Just a moment, said the old man. He summed zero to zero, slowly, then shut off the adding machine.

For a remembrance, is it? the old man asked sadly.

Yes.

She must be very special to you. Well, let's see what we have in our floral section.

Across the hall was a door inset with a black window. The old man knocked three times, then unlocked it.— It's only me here today, he explained.

The darkened room, not much larger than a closet, smelled of jasmine and sweet pea. The old man turned on the light. There was nothing inside but a sink and a long steel table.

I'm expecting a delivery right about now, said the old man. Ah, here it comes.

Through the mail slot sped a cylindrical tube wrapped in black paper. The old man caught it as it came, then slowly rolled it round and round on the table.— Yes, he said, this must be your order. A hundred dollars, please. It's best to keep them in the package right up to the graveside, because this species is perishable, unfortunately. Quite light-sensitive, you see. They might last until sunrise tomorrow.

Thank you for helping me.

You won't suffer as much as she did, said the old man. Don't be afraid.

Are you Mr. Murmuracki?

No, I'm his father. Would you like a receipt?

Suspecting that this might be a test, he gazed into the old man's sorrowful eyes and said: I trust you.

Thank you for coming to see me, said Victoria. It makes me happy. There's not a lot to do down here.

Nor much for me up here. I'm glad it's getting dark—

I loved what you said to me last time. It had me laughing and laughing . . .

What did I say? Anyhow, were you truly laughing?

I was laughing down here but I didn't want you to know.

Why didn't you?

So you wouldn't have power over me. It's bad enough that you called me up. I had no choice but to come to you.

If you'd had a choice, would you have come?

I have a choice now. I don't have to be with you unless I want to.

Well, that's a compliment, he said wearily.

Don't get irritated. If you do, I'll hide. What did you bring me?

Moonflowers, I hope.

Did you really? It's been ages since anybody brought me a present! Please, please open them right now. Oh, they're pretty!

Where shall I put them?

Lay them down across my headstone, and then I'll sit here and hold them in my lap, like this. Do I look beautiful?

So beautiful—

I'll tell you a secret. I've never seen moonflowers before!

Where did you learn about them?

A long time ago I overheard the family in that mausoleum arguing. It was quite nasty, actually; I won't repeat what they said. And the wife said that she wouldn't forgive the husband for a hundred and one years, unless he gave her moonflowers.

And did he?

I don't know. How could he get them? I don't care about that couple really, although the elder daughter can be sweet. I don't care about very many people. Do you think I should keep flirting with you like this?

Well, why do you suppose I'm here?

For love or advice.

Or both, if you're interested. But I've spent so many years assuming that you weren't—

But here you are, she laughed. As if we might have a
future.

Or a past.

It upsets me that everyone up here mentions the future so unemotionally. Why don't they scream
death, death, death
?

Because we—

Because you don't care! It's too awful and far away.

You're not far away. Not from me.

No. But I'm awful. I was always awful to you.

You're being nice to me right now. What was in your mind when I came to you?

Well, my first thought was, you still have the hormones of a seventeen-year-old, and you'll never get beyond that with me. Then I thought: How sweet, actually! You must have considered what would cheer up a rotting skeleton with her eyesockets full of worms—

But that's not your form—

Look! See!

He nearly screamed. But he compelled himself to be brave, and advanced toward her with outstretched arms.

At once she became as pale as a spring sky at twilight, but she was waveringly seventeen. The beauty of that he couldn't bear; he would rather have her be a skeleton.

One of the reasons Victoria had left him was that at seventeen he was intensely morbid, and when he sent her a notebook filled with poems about skeleton women, she responded with angry disgust. This notebook and her final letter to him lay within a large yellow envelope in that drawer of his desk, buried, probably accidentally, beneath her other letters; whenever he saw that yellow envelope, which had turned orange with age, he felt sickish, and so he had never looked inside it since that first time, when they were seventeen. (Very slowly and cautiously, in tiny bites, he chewed a wisp of bread, hoping to calm his stomach.) In point of fact, whatever nausea the envelope recalled or engendered could not have afflicted him, since he forgot it for so many years at a time, and never reopened it. Since then he must have become, it seemed safe to say, a successful, alluring individual, for just look at all those letters from other women! When he was seventeen, no girl but Victoria had been at all interested in him. The
reason that the envelope's contents might unsettle his belly was that (until we begin dying, of course) the future is a new blank notebook unmarred, in which all our wishes may perhaps be written, while whatever
has
been written, being utterly real, must be utterly imperfect. And thank goodness he had done better and better since then! Why on earth would he care to wallow in the grief and humiliation of that time before he had begun to do well? Hence opening the notebook would have been painful enough; as for rereading Victoria's stinging final letter, no, thank you.— So as he pulled fat or thin envelopes out of that pile, at first it was with a feeling of sweetness; and then, as the probability of drawing a letter similar to the one in that orange envelope increased (and probably he would open the orange envelope sometime, out of mere thoroughness), he found the nausea beginning to waft up out of his guts and into his throat.

And yet, strange to say, Victoria had herself been morbid. She had written him a romantic letter:
Jesus, I want to die of leukemia, too!

Why on earth had the two of them wanted that? He had forgotten. And there were ever so many letters left to reread; perhaps he would never find the answer; very likely neither of them had known, being only seventeen.

(Seventeen is actually a perfectly aware and decisive age, he reminded himself. I am no wiser than I was then—merely farther away from being seventeen.)

It was certainly strange not to remember the circumstances of so peculiar a thing. Why had he written those poems? And what was he supposed to be learning now? But since his reacquaintance with Victoria had rendered the close of his life a sort of fairy tale, such incidental failures of recollection and understanding failed to trouble him. On certain hot afternoons when he felt so unwell that even a crumb of bread on his tongue made him retch, and Victoria's letters were too much for him, he lay down with a volume of someone else's fairy stories. One of Hermann Hesse's parables accompanied someone away from the blue iris flower of his childhood.
With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw how empty and wasted the life behind him had become. It no longer belonged to him but was strange and disconnected, like something once memorized that could be recalled only with difficulty in the form of barren fragments.
For
the man who loved Victoria, the past was not this way. To be sure, it no longer belonged to him, but he did not wish to be seventeen anymore; and however much he had forgotten scarcely mattered, since he would so soon lose the rest. Moreover, had his life been any more empty than Victoria's, or anyone's? Could he have done better? If not, regret would be misplaced. So the hot days embraced him as he lay sweating and queasy on his bed, and only occasionally did her old letters speak to him. Sometimes they charmed or embarrassed him, but did they hint at anything of which he had lost sight? Had Isaac been correct in his way of life, and Luke in his death, then the thing to do was to open his hands and let the letters fall away. Well, should he? The women whom he had clung to (and who had clung to him), the erotic gardens in which he had played, entering and leaving them through caverns of loneliness, these had offered him ever so many blue irises, including Victoria herself; and the flowers, now pressed and preserved in his desk drawer, retained as much fragrance as any dying man deserved. They proved that his life had not been wasted.

The night grew as dark as a mausoleum's doorway. Victoria had told him how to find the spot where the Spirit of Progress had updated the cemetery wall into a chainlink fence cut with a hole. Through this he now came and went as he pleased, counting off stone Sphinxes, eagles and doves to avoid getting lost. Sometimes he heard the muffled rhythmic clapping of unseen wings.

My first child was the politest, she said. He never comes here. Of course, if he did, he couldn't see me. There's no helpful witch in love with him. How she must hate you!

You haven't met her, evidently.

Why should I take the trouble? I'm not interested.

But you mentioned her.

Well, I admit to feeling flattered that you used her potion or whatever it was in order to see me! And since you chose me over her, I certainly don't need to be jealous, do I?

No.

But I think you should go home and live your life. You don't have much of it left.

Do you know when I'll die?

Yes, but cross my heart, I'll never, ever tell you! No one truly wants to know.

How much do you miss your life?

I miss my children. I certainly don't miss you. I miss my house. I miss—oh, we had an aquarium with a catfish in it that kept swimming madly around, trying to die; I used to go down there in the middle of the night to watch it . . .

And what did you feel?

Now I know I was watching myself, but at the time I just felt amused, the way I used to when I hurt you and you tried to hide it from me; I think I've always been a sadist, although I've never done anything terrible. Or have I? How terrible was I to you?

I don't remember.

You see? That's how it is!

He asked about the neighbors, and she said: I don't particularly like the family next door, because they don't engage in intellectual discussions; they'd rather give impressions and unanalyzed opinions. Of course, I'm not exactly brilliant myself, so that's ungracious of me . . .

And who's on the other side?

That woman is thoroughly unpleasant. All she likes to do is chew the dirt in her grave. Oh, dear, I shouldn't have told you that, because—

So that's what happens.

Not to all of us.

What happens to the rest?

Victoria smiled.— Someday I might tell you.

Annoyed and weary, he considered walking away. But then he remembered that his illness caused him to be irritable, just as Luke had been whenever the pain tired him without making him desperate or confused.

As if to further spite him, she added: Actually I like them all. I don't have anybody else who goes back so far. Certainly not you.

But we've known each other forty years.

I think we haven't. You'd forgotten my name until I wrote you.

No, I hadn't.

But what kind of memory do you actually have? You think that you remember things, but you're actually at the point where it all goes away.

Will it come back when I'm dead? Don't ghosts remember everything?

You're always fishing for answers. I think we should just agree that I don't have to tell you anything.

Spoken like a seventeen-year-old girl!

Well, I'm immature. I married at twenty-one so I would never have to have another affair to get what I wanted.

What exactly did you want?

I won't tell you.

Naturally. Well, did you get what you wanted?

She was silent. Then she said: I hope you've found your satisfaction somewhere. If my husband had ever cheated I'd have killed him.